Russia (Russian: Росси́я), also officially known as the Russian Federation (Russian: Росси́йская Федера́ция), is a sovereign state in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic. At 17,125,200 square kilometres (6,612,100 sq mi), Russia is the largest country in the world, covering more than one-eighth of the Earth's inhabited land area, and the ninth most populous, with over 146.6 million people at the end of March 2016. Extending across the entirety of northern Asia and much of Eastern Europe, Russia spans eleven time zones and incorporates a wide range of environments and landforms. From northwest to southeast, Russia shares land borders with Norway, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland (both with Kaliningrad Oblast), Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, China, Mongolia, and North Korea. It shares maritime borders with Japan by the Sea of Okhotsk and the U.S. state of Alaska across the Bering Strait.

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Links To Peel

Tikhvin Cemetry in St Petersburg where some of Russia's classical musicians are buried

Peel first visited Russia with his wife Sheila along with BBC Radio One controller Johnny Beerling in 1988 to the cities of Moscow and St Petersburg (at that time called Leningrad). Peel described Moscow in Margrave Of The Marshes as bitterly cold and the food disgusting. Also in the book, Peel described an event in Moscow on a train platform where he and others were waiting to meet Mischa, the travel guide, in the night:

Radio 1 'On Show' magazine, 1988.

"We stepped from the train on a poorly lit platform on which there appeared to be not a single living soul and it was at this point that our confidence started to evaporate. My imagination started generating newspaper headlines of the TOP DJ MISSING IN MOSCOW variety and I consoled myself by further imagining the disappointment of most British readers when they realised that it wasn't Noel Edmonds who had gone astray but some bugger they hardly knew."[1]

At St Petersburg, amongst their visits Peel and Sheila visited the cemetery where Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and Rachmaninov are buried.

Also in 1988, Peel attended a Big Country album launch at the Soviet embassy.[1]

Peel's second visit to Russia in 1992 included his travels to St Petersburg and the neighbouring Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, as part of a conjunction with the BBC World Service.

Sessions

The following artists from Russia recorded sessions for the John Peel Show: